Sunday, August 2, 2026
Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play
Console listing touch-ups
A quieter, tidying-up kind of day. A teaser video for Scorcha’s arrival went together in VSDC, and the Google Play Console listing got a pass: better keywords, a clearer description, and fresh screenshots taken on iPhone, tablet and PC to round out the store page.
Watch the teaser: He Doesn’t Wait for You to Jump; Scorcha is Live (YouTube)
The sign-in bug
The afternoon’s real work was a login bug: signing out would leave the app showing premium status as a guest, then signing back in threw a sync failure and nothing would fetch from Firebase. Running it through Claude turned up the cause; the production build was missing a function or two around billing.
“I told it to never make any more versions with change logs bundled up in the file from now on: it should only make production versions, so it doesn’t have to compile a production version from a full version.”
A second smaller bug: no way to check whether an update was available; got fixed in the same pass.
Published, and what’s next
With Floor Is Lava now live, attention turned to the next app in the pipeline: the BeStreak PB Tracker, eight days into its closed-testing window with six to go before it can follow the same path to release.
“That’s two down out of the way. Now I’m just trying to figure out what the next app is that I’m going to put onto Google Play.”
Gameplay videos, and the “AI slop” comments
Later, the plan shifted toward building trust through content rather than straight promotion; recording real gameplay-through videos of Floor Is Lava, the same way Geometry Dash playthroughs work, so people could see how the game plays and get a shot at beating the recorded run.
Two early YouTube comments called the game “AI slop,” with one guessing it was made with ChatGPT or Claude.
“Guys, maybe it was, but I spent three months working on this game: it came from my mind, and my kid drew the lava ship with his own hands. He’s a seven-year-old kid who created one of the central pieces of the game. Give us some credit, guys.”
The game had also made its first money; seventeen cents, just from watching ads on the platform personally. Not much, but proof the loop works: spend a little to acquire a player, get some of it back in ad views, and the rest comes from people who stick around.
A new lava meter
A late-night Claude Design storyboard produced an idea worth keeping: a vertical lava-coloured meter running up the side of the screen, climbing in step with how high you’ve gotten in a level; platform 1 at the bottom, platform 1,000 (on a long level) at the top, so you can watch your own progress rise as you climb.
“I thought that was a good idea: why didn’t I think of that?”
It went straight into the game the same night.
Game Rules Log: August 2, 2026
- New: vertical lava-coloured progress meter on screen edge, climbs in real time with your platform height in the level
- Fixed: sign-out/sign-in no longer desyncs premium status between guest and signed-in accounts
- Fixed: app-update availability check now works correctly
- Production builds are now compiled clean, without bundled change-log data
Photos from today
Read what happens next in the dev diary: the next entry.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
